On September 25th at 3.00 pm, the Gender conference will start afor Bari International Film Festival, a review that examines, researches, studies, masterpieces of the history of cinema in relation to gender, identity and sexual orientation. Inside the historic Palazzo delle Poste in Bari (Cesare Battisti Sq, 1), a marvelous example of the fascist rationalist art, Luciano Lapadula – fashion historian and writer – will analyze the theme “Styles – Genres – Disguises”. The study of signs related to fashion, makeup, hairstyles that since 1968 has divided and mixed genres and sexual symbology, from Twiggy to Bowie, from Coccinelle to Amanda Lear. Luciano Lapadula’s speech is based on his book “The Macabre and the Grotesque in Fashion and Costume“, available at the following link: https://www.progedit.com/libro-589.html

History repeats itself cyclically, exhibiting fragility, fears, hopes, illusions and chimeras of the human soul. So from the “thousand no more thousand” to the fire of new apocalypses the temporal space seems to be reduced to a few moments, and that dark part of the Middle Ages returns to creep into the social fabric, into religious faith.

This time we are in mid-eighteenth-century Russia, the reign of “Catherine the Great”, an empress who looked at the modernity of French thought, which at the time wanted the defeat of senselessness on the part of rationality. However, the people represented by Catherine II, largely too poor, were free from the charm of the elites as well as that of rational thought. The schism of 1656 had divided society into “new” and “old” believers, and to this last group belonged – after a hundred years – the many farmers reduced to poverty. The need for existential certainties, the hope – the only one – of a post mortem redemption, the burning conviction of a near end of humanity, were the outbreaks of the incredible and devastating return to the heretical belief from a past that was thought to have been forgotten .

The most important sect constituted in that period was that of the word “skoptsy” which derives from the term “skopets” or castrated. It was in fact the tragic ritual of the emasculation the cornerstone on which that creed was based.

Once again sex returned to being lived as the most terrible of sins, the forbidden fruit offered by the devil, an indispensable temptation to be escaped only by mutilating and thus extirpating organs and desire from the body and soul. That faith drew its own identity from an altered interpretation of the Gospel of Matthew, precisely from the passage in which the dialogue between the disciples and Christ on divorce is described. While they assert that to avoid it, perhaps it would be better for the man not to marry the woman, Jesus answers them: “All cannot accept this saying, but only those to whom it has been given:12 For there area]”>[a]eunuchs who were born thus from their mother’s womb, andthere are eunuchs who were made eunuchs by men, and there are eunuchs who have made themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven’s sake. He who is able to accept it,let him accept it.”(Matthew 19: 11-12)

Driven by the most absolute fanaticism, the faithful were convinced that the “baptism of fire” of Christ was a metaphor of his castration, which therefore made the Messiah the first among the eunuchs. From the delirious rereading of the biblical passages came the certainty that Adam and Eve were created by God devoid of sexual organs and that only after falling into temptation would they develop on their bodies.

The mystic founder of the sect, Kondratij Selivanov, indoctrinated the proselytes. His frightful motto described the practice of self-castration to which he had submitted: “Give me then my sword, for you cut the serpent’s head with your right hand.”

Seraphic in appearance, endowed with considerable intelligence and great magnetism, he marked the history of Russia, a land always attracted by charismatic characters and religious schisms. In short, he succeeded in depopulating among the peoples, passing from the countryside to the fashionable salons of the St. Petersburg and Moscow aristocrats. Inside those rooms, always on the top floor of the house, a metaphor of Heaven, the saint stood out on a canopy, wearing sumptuous vestments, surrounded by mystical, strongly evocative, obsessive sets.

Divided into rooms based on sex, those present, among them many children, burned hypnotized by the presence of the “god made man”, and in rituals that flowed from the spiritual into the absurd, were abandoned to hysterical songs and dances. Often during these ceremonies it happened that the “masters” used scissors and knives to intervene on the body and soul of the initiates. So women were given breast amputation, and “clitoridectomy” with the ablation of part of the small and large lips. For men, even for children, the removal of the scrotum and the testicles was instead inflicted. The ritual of the “imperial seal” was rather frightening, which instead provided for the complete emasculation of the penis. At the end of the interventions the new eunuchs shouted: “Christ is risen.”

The oblations of the nobles introduced more and more money into the coffers of the masters of the sect, who, thirsty for wealth, began to obstruct one another, until their epilogue was ratified with denunciations and slander. In 1820 also Selivanov was arrested, which inflicted the mortal body on skoptsy. One last bastion of the coven was registered in Romania around 1880.

Kondratij, a man who passed from the poverty of peasant life to the palaces of power of the Tsar, died at one hundred and two years, not being able to witness the birth of one who would have obscured his presence for fame or infamy, Grigorij Efimovič Rasputin, but this is another story.

Go further, but also return back. Reject a common approach to give vent to an “I” dividedbetween fetishistic drive and rejection of social relationships. All this takes shape, and life, in the Sex Doll, which has a very ancient history. From drawings and writings it is clear that they have been used since the 16th century, related to a special form of paraphilia called “pigmalionism”, consisting in feeling pleasure during the fulfillment of a sexual act with a statue or a plastic representation of the human body.

The name that identifies this type of psychosexual disorder derives its origin from the mythical figure of Pygmalion. The king of Cyprus in fact fell madly in love with a statue he had created, and he got from Aphrodite that the sculpture was transformed into a living woman who he later married.

Unlike what happens with the most common “sex toys”, in use by men and women even in the Middle Ages, in the pigmalionism the doll is a fetish that replaces entirely the human bodies, and the fulfillment comes only in the case in which certain conditions exist such as inhumanity, thus describing a much more complex psychological process. Disappear the animus of the relationship and the exchange deriving from it, replaced by a superego that is also paradoxically the explicit affirmation of a debased and incapable, bored, individualistic ego.

With the passing of time these instruments of pleasure were perfected and made of woolen stuffed fabric, often the head was sewn real hair, on the face painted eyes, nose and mouth. Called “dames de voyage” accompanied the men who for various reasons were forced to live far from the fair sex.

Curious what happened during the Second World War, when German soldiers would have to have at their disposal inflatable dolls to be easily stored in the backpack after use. The project was never realized. We will have to wait for the second half of the 20th century to witness a capillary and effective diffusion of inflatable dolls made in latex. Blondes, brunettes, reds, today their humanoid appearance challenges perfection, loved by collectors find space in museums, but their favorite place always remains in the secret of a room, for a plastic love.